The church set the date for the burning. It was a sign. The idea had jumped around in his head like a hot spark out of a bonfire. Sure, he didn’t know his mom’s language, nor had he ever been to a ceremony for the dead, but he was tired of people joking about dumb Indians and smart ones and Stupid Finns and big-headed Norwegians, and the dirty Lapps, the Chonky and Chink, and the skanky women who were trying to be loved. Those things were as good reasons as any he’d told himself, as he slipped the lighter into his pocket.
Suvi, his wife, went to the Presbyterian Church once in a while. Suvi had told him about the sermon young gave after Kirsti had been murdered in Sitka. It still angered him to think about. Young preached about the consequences of loose women two days before Kirsti’s memorial. Loose women? Who in the hell says that these days?
Sure, he’d been over to Kirsti’s place a couple of times when she lived on the low road. Kirsti was sweet. He was a married man when he did that, had been married to Suvi for quite a few years and they had two kids. But Suvi was different. She liked girls too. He knew that about her, and he still loved her. Love was love. What did it matter?
He’d fixed the screens on Kirsti’s windows and put a new element in her oven. She was a nice girl, and he thought he might be in love with her, but he could not leave Suvi. Suvi had claimed Mr. Young had yelled out, “Keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.” Suvi said she feigned a headache and got up and left. He was proud of Suvi always sticking up for folks.
Things were weird now, though. Kirsti was dead. It still sounded strange when he said it, when he thought it. Kirsti’s dead. Over the last few years since she died, spring was arriving earlier, the sea had risen nearly forty inches, there were more butterflies in the summer, and the Dungeness crab were decreasing. There were more weird things. Since she died he’d been having dreams about dragons as if they were real. Whenever he was stressed he’d dream of them. He’d done that all his life. That’s how he knew he was under too much stress: he’d fight a dragon and kick the shit out of his sheets. His big brother Dewie used to scare him with a lot of talk about dragons. When he was little, Dewie told a tale of four dragons that flew from the sea into the sky—how they made it rain.
Now, Cooper stood in the church, watching the fire. After a minute, he decided he’d better head through the kitchen and out the back door. Dewie would be jumping into his turnouts soon and heading over. Cooper laughed: Dewie, the pyro. Dewie the dragon. He’d always thought Dewie had the problem with fire. Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly a problem. What it was, though, he didn’t know.
Once, when they were kids, his friend Karl Agard told him to ask his big brother Dewie about the town fire. Cooper was impressionable and looked up to Dewie. He was five years younger than Dewie—his mother said he was an oops. Cooper was born in the year of the Tiger: He’d thought that was stupid. He’d never seen a tiger before, only the big lynx his uncle had shot one time. He wanted to fight dragons. Be the hero. Funny thing, Cooper could remember the fire. It was as if he was walking with his mother and brother that night. But he knew it couldn’t be true. His mother was six months pregnant with him when the town burned down. She would always talk about that night, cross herself when she told the story. She told the same story over and over again, how the fire chased her out of the house. How it seemed to think and move around the town, burning building after building.
Cooper had once asked his big brother Dewie if he’d started the town fire. There were rumors, of course. No, Dewie had said, it was a dragon living in the back of stores: the furnace dragon. The night of the fire, when their mother was escaping from their store up to St. Rose of Lima, Dewie said he’d seen it sashaying down the alley with its long tail and breathing out water along with fire.
Cooper walked out the back door of the Presbyterian Church into the night toward the treeline. Someone had beat him to it. He didn’t see any cars rushing away. He stood next to a hundred-year-old spruce, ears still ringing from the explosion, trying to sense a shadow or listen for a snapping twig. Most of the church lot was cleared, had been cleared for a hundred years, since about the time John Muir showed up in town when they were building the manse.
Dewie had also told him that, when Mr. John Muir built the bonfire on Mount Dewey, it was really a dragon and Muir didn’t want to tell anyone about it. What if it a dragon did live up there? Dewie had said dragons get hungry in the winter and come out of hiding and that’s why there’s a lot of house fires in the winter. When the dragon is starved, that’s not good, especially if the dragon remains at a temperature above the fire point of the fuel gases. Give the dragon oxygen and the dragon inhales and the gas is heated and expands. Dewie warned Cooper to watch out for puffs of smoke sucking back into a room beneath a door frame. Also watch for dragons on the ceiling moving up from a couch, spreading its tongue along the ceiling. Dewie was full of shit. Mostly. Maybe. But his advice had kept him alive all these years. Maybe it was time to retire from fighting fire. Maybe he was testing the fates.
“Why are you a fireman, Dewie?” Cooper recalled asking his brother once.
“Because I want to fight dragons,” Dewie had said.
To Cooper, that made sense. Cooper had seen what dragons in basements could do. Cooper remembered the dragon furnaces Dewie had told him about. He’d seen a dragon in the back of Hammer’s Hardware. Its eyes glowed orange. Dewie snuck him into the back of the store and there it was, roaring. Huo Long, Dewie called it.
Cooper knew what woodstove dragons and hot-bacon-frying-pan dragons could do, too. One December, a few days after Christmas, he and Dewie were called to a fire. It was an address they knew but no one used street names. Typically, a fire location was announced by referring to the house next to it or the informal names of the neighborhoods and the roads—the blue house next to the Dammens or the small yellow trailer next to the Johnssons. That time, it was Karl Agard’s cousin, who’d recently gotten her own place. Now, four days after she’d moved in, her small brown tarpapered house was on fire out at six mile on the loop road before the pulp mill—second driveway on the right.
That time, the woodstove dragon coughed out sparks on magazines and kindling set too close. Cooper had stayed with Karl until they found his cousin’s charred body. She was twenty-two years old. When they found her, Cooper tried to pull Karl away, but Karl looked anyway and then bent down and puked all over the charcoal-smeared snow.
Cooper always thought there were too many house fires in Wrangell, despite the fact the fire department held woodstove safety classes and handed out free smoke detectors. Then it occurred to him that maybe the dragons weren’t starved. They were pissed off. Someone had offended them. The dragons were mad because the white folks used to cut up the bodies of dead Chinese workers and salt them and stuff the body parts into big barrels and put them out on Deadmans Island—the small island at the mouth of the Stikine near the airport. Over the years, about a dozen or more barrels had accumulated on the island. It was Suvi's grandmother, Grandma Tova, who protested and demanded they bury the Chinese dead in the cemetery like Christians. This was history he didn’t learn in school. He’d heard it from the old-timers: it must be true.
Grandma Tova was a young woman then. She went down the dock and yelled at them. A river scow was sitting there with two barrels ready to go to Deadmans Island. The young men had died of a severe flu that swept through town. Grandma Tova had two other ladies with her. One was a Japanese woman, but the men in the skiff didn’t know that. The women made them haul the barrels up to the cemetery and bury them properly. And Cooper’s great-grandpa, Captain Jinks, had helped conduct a ceremony.
No one came from China to get the barrels on Deadmans Island though—not that Cooper knew of. They disintegrated. Probably there were a lot of bones and spirits running around, which was why no one ever went there.
The fire trucks pulled up, and the firemen ran hoses to the church. Cooper walked to his truck where it was parked
on the back street, got in, and drove around to the other side in front of the church. He hopped out, already in his turnout gear. Dewie stood there, spraying water on the church along with a dozen or more volunteers. The fire shot up out of the windows and the water fell equally hard against it—fire and water competing in the natural world of elements. Cooper watched his brother desperately trying to stop the fire from rising up through the roof to the red cross, which had now gone out in the church’s tower. The urge to jump in and help no longer pulled him toward the heat.
Babies dream inside the womb, his mother had said. Maybe it’s like trauma DNA. His mom was a smart woman. His dragon dreams chased him a lot lately.
A memory or a dream?—a red chrysanthemum firework exploded and he felt its heat. The fire went through him as if performing a dragon dance. He kicked and moved with it, pressing against his mother’s belly. Gongs chimed as he rose and fell and twisted with the “whirlpool,” the “cloud cave,” and the “dragon chasing the pearl.” In the dream or not a dream, the dance ended with a burst of firecrackers, and at that moment, Cooper knew he was alive.
Date: 2010s
Recorded by John Swanton
Assisted by Tooch Waterson
Speaker: Mina Agard
Daughter of the Tides
I’m sitting on a log watching the tide come in. I’ve got about another hour, so there’s enough time to tell you a story. It starts like this: When I was a teenager, I was impatient, and I couldn’t wait for the berries to ripen, so maybe it was the blueberry leaves I ate. I loved to pick the blossoms off and eat them. I ate the leaves too. But I suspect it might have been the spruce tips, those unripe needles hanging off the end of the spruce branches I picked sooner than nature intended. I know, I know. I’ve heard the story: Raven turns himself into a spruce needle and falls into a young woman’s drinking cup and she becomes pregnant with him. Raven did that so he could get inside the Head-Man’s house and steal the sun, moon, and stars, and bring daylight to mankind. Maybe that’s how it happened, but somehow, I found myself pregnant at sixteen years old.
My friends swirled a ring attached to a string in the air around my belly. Someone said, if the string moved in a circle, it meant I’d have a girl. Back and forth meant I’d have a boy. I watched the power in my swollen belly sway the string back and forth and they shrieked, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!”
I said, “I think it’s a girl.” At that age, tricks lurked in sweaty basketball players’ jerseys and on the backseat of a Plymouth Fury. I rubbed my belly. “You are a girl,” I said to my swollen mound. At Doc Heggan’s office, he listened to the heartbeat: rapid and strong. He claimed the fast heartbeat indicated it was probably a boy. I said, “No, it’s a girl.” It was.
When I held Tova for the first time, she opened her eyes and looked up at me as if to ask her mother-child if I was, in fact, her mother. “Whose daughter shall I say that I am?” she asked. I told her, like me, she’s a child of seafoam and a child of Raven. When Tova was six months old, I let her feel the cold sea water, let her clasp bull kelp in her hands, put it in her mouth and taste it. I pointed out the killer whale pod hanging out in front of town. I told her how to talk respectfully to them. I set Tova in the dirt and let her taste rocks. She tasted the salt water and the earth, taking it inside her.
As Tova grew, she showed amazing feats: she read at three years old. She loved conversations with elders. She could make her own blueberry pancakes in the shapes of dinosaurs when she was only four. Often, she’d tell me things only grownups could know, like how slack tide happens when the direction of the tidal current reverses.
Tova loved to swing from tree branches, ride her bike, and camp outside all summer, living like a typical Alaskan child. But she knew and I knew she was far from typical. Her Grandma Berta said I should’ve made Tova wear dresses and more pink, but we live in Southeastern Alaska on an island, and it’s cold here year-round. Grandma Berta thought the lack of dresses and exposure to the color pink made Tova want to kiss girls instead of boys. But my raven-child likes the color black, I argued: all ravens do. I was always defending Tova’s sense of freedom and exploration. “She’s of a curious nature,” I said.
Eventually, though, Tova’s dreams outgrew the four walls of my house and the island we live on. She was ready, much too soon, to leave my nest. So I let her go—she doesn’t really fit in with island folks—the people who find it intellectually stimulating to peel the labels off their beer bottles every Friday night. “Go,” I told her, “Jesus wasn’t welcome in his hometown either.”
So, Tova left on the blue-canoe—our ferry—and sailed “Down South.” I didn’t hear from her for a while, but one day she called me and told me she was going to school and working with head trauma patients in Seattle. “They throw shit at you,” she laughed. “And they swear all the time and they bite you, but I get to hold their hands. And I tell them I can see their spirit. I know who they really are. It calms them.” I held the phone and sighed, knowing she gets the cosmic joke too.
Tova wandered from Raven’s territory into Coyote’s, and after Coyote mentored her a while, she called me and said she missed the water and wanted to come back home. So I paid for a ticket, and she rode the blue-canoe back home again. Tova walked up the ferry ramp with a shaved head. What was left of her long dark hair was dyed pink. I felt her pink prickled head. “Indian warpaint,” she told me, laughing.
Tova explained to me that Isaac Asimov, Rumi, Sherman Alexie, and Kurt Vonnegut traveled with her in her backpack. At home, she pulled out her carving tools, long underwear, and address books crammed with the names of fellow tricksters she’d met along the way. She had journals overflowing with handwritten notes and poems—lots of poems.
After a while, Tova’s hair grew out, and she started wearing her traditional dress: Carhartts and a long-sleeve thermal T-shirt. She lugged her backpack around town, telling everyone her stories while she whittled on yellow cedar, carving feast dishes and dance masks. She read her poems in coffee shops, to elders, to kids, to friends, and at Shakes Island tribal house for tourists. The local tribe was so impressed they wanted Tova to read her poems at the November ceremony to celebrate Indians. She told me, “Gee, we Indians get a whole month to be remembered.”
So, tonight, I went to hear her read her poems at Shakes Island, thinking I’d be the only one clapping with my feet. I was watching the crowd when she was reading one of her poems—the one about being a civilized Indian. She was making the crowd squirm, their Indian expectations withered. She’s too pale. She’s too literate. She’s too young. She’s not an elder.
Tova read her poems: one about being a snail. One about killer whales. Another about working in the fish cannery. And one about being, or not really being, an American. As she was reading her not-really-being poem, she paused, and then tried reading again, but her voice faltered. In fact, it kind of squawked. Her eyes fluttered and she looked out at the audience and smiled. I almost jumped from my seat and ran up on the stage, but I couldn’t stop staring at her.
Her long black hair fell forward into her face, and when she raised her head, a beak had grown from where her mouth once was. Her dark eyes were small and round and the hair around her face turned to slick black feathers. The force of a hundred gasps in the room—mine included—created a draft that raised her up off the floor. Tova flew up through the smoke hole and out into the sky. Afterward, her poems fluttered from the podium, falling like alder leaves to the floor.
I ran outside after my changeling, leaving the spectators’ mouths gaping open, choking down their golden orbs, stories they didn’t quite understand. I knew it would take a while for their brains to untwist their long-held worldviews, to adjust to such trickery where women shapeshift into birds, windows into smoke holes, and philosophies into poems. I left them wondering whose daughter she really was.
Outside, I followed the shadow of her wings down the road to the beach. She circled over the beach and landed on a yellow cedar log�
��the kind of log killer whales were created from. I didn’t approach her, but I was thinking of Tova’s birth, how her watchful eyes looked up at me. She sat on the log picking off broken limpets and dried seaweed. I waited as the tide swirled and spiraled around the log, coaxing it from the sand. The log rolled trying to gain its balance atop the water, unsure whether or not it was a log or a war canoe. And with the She-Raven on its back, the log floated out beyond the islands. I watched until the log got smaller and smaller until it was no more.
Now you have the story, for what it is. As you can tell, indigenous people are Chekhov-like: our stories don’t necessarily end when or where you want them to end. Sometimes, Raven is still the trickster, waiting with us to see where things go, how they end up. So, imagine yourself here with me. I pick off some spruce tips and share them with you. We sit down on a rock near the tideline. We take off our shoes and socks and put our feet in the cold water. We chew on tart spruce tips and watch the tide swirl around a patch of bull kelp. We watch. I’m unshaken and at the same time I’m amused because I know Raven will be back someday. Maybe, when the north wind blows. Maybe, when the tide comes wandering back. Maybe, when a pod of killer whales swim near shore. Or maybe, as soon as I tell you another story.
The Dead Go to Seattle Page 21
